Fire Mage PvE situational talent choice. Help needed.

Since I picked up wow again after a 2 year break, i've been reading up on everything possible for my mage class and the game itself. I've learnd how to maximize my DPS with stats, enchantments and gem choices etc. 1 think that i've been struggling to find a good answer to tho is talents. In what situation do you choose which talent.

I will list the talents and comment on when I think you are supposed to use this talent, compared to the others in the same tier. Please let me know if I understood things correctly, and if not, what I'm supposed to change.

PLEASE NOTE: This is for a raiding Fire mage.

Tier 1:

PoM: I choose PoM if the fight does not require much movement. In a patchwerk-style fight, PoM provides the most DPS in this tier (Using Alter Time etc etc)

Scorch: If the fight requires you to move a lot, you choose scorch since its castable while moving.

Ice Floes: Never..?

Tier 2:

Ice Barrier: Always

Blazing speed and Temporal Shield: Never

Tier 3:

Situational from fight to fight. If there's 1 target that can and need to be CC'd, use Frostjaw. Otherwise I hang on to Ring of Frost for pretty much every fight. Im not sure if Ice Ward is ever a good choice.

Tier 4:

I guess this is also a situational tier. I mainly use Cauterize for every fight. I'm not sure when Cold snap or Greater Invis should be priorotized. Perhaps some help here would be usefull.

Tier 5:

Nether Tempest: Whenever there's 1 boss only to target and no adds, you choose this talent.

Living Bomb: When there's 2, maybe 3? targets in the bossfight, you chose Living bomb. Im not sure how many targets there should be to make Living Bomb worth taking over Nether Tempest. Please help me with this.

Frost Bomb: As a fire mage; Never?

Tier 6:

Invocation: A fight that requires movement, you chose this talent.

Rune of Power: Any patchwerk-style fight were you require little to no movement, Rune of Power is a better choice over Invocation for maximum DPS.

Incanter's ward: Unless survival is extremley important (Currently I believe there are no such fights in MoP), this talent is useless compared to the others.

Now, if there's anything you see I've misunderstood or you would like to add, please let me know. Im aware of that most of these questions are noob questions, but I'd like a confirmation on that the information I've read on the internet are correct.

Tier2 :
Temporal shield : always, other : never
I never waste a GCD shielding myself when temporal shield can do the same thing and even better with no GCD loss; DPS is my first duty. Temporal shield often soak much more damage than ice barrier when triggered correctly.

Tier4 : cauterize for every fight except when there is a bigger damage needing to be taken that would kill you on cauterize : use invisibility (HC:Elegon is a good example). There is also a good utility to cold snap when you have to soak great damage twice in a row (HC:Zor'lok in phase 2, you can double Iceblock force and verve and let the shields available to other people)

Tier6 : Invocation pretty much everywhere except when there is a constant raid damage aura (HC:Will of emperor or Garalon); I never use the rune personnaly).

Temporal Shield vs. Icebarrier was discussed endless times in this forum. Just use the search.
To say use only 1 is stupid. You allways have to thought about the encounter, your own tactic and your own playstyle and then u decide which works better.
Same for the last tier.
Bombs as allways (and also endless often said in the forum/stickies): nt for 1, lb for 2-3, fb for more. The spec doesnt matter.
Do we really need a new thread for an old topic?
Read the stickies! Everything is said.

temporal shield is better than ice barrier, as it not only has the power to heal ALL of the damage you would have taken excluding a killing blow, and then some, most fights with heavy raid damage (these fights a numerous this tier), it is actually soo powerful i am healing up my own damage taken faster than healers can get me back up after an aoe burst from the boss (the timing on the cooldown is perfect for rain of blades on wind lord mel'jarak), blazing speed is extremely situational, and the other 2 are better in the vast majority of situations.

as for the others u list t1 is kinda personal choice to a point, scorch is kinda big for heavy movement fights, like will of the emperor etc, PPoM is useful for setting up big burst for fights like elegon where the pull can sometimes make or break your dps, icy floes has kinda been made redundant due to blink, if there is movement that requires more than blink, u pick scorch, because teh cast time of your filler spell is too long to mak using this cooldown worthwhile.

t3 is meh, frostjaw is a waste of time in pve, and only a very small number of fights with adds actually benefit from having ring of frost, where as ice ward is extremely useful on elegon with the small adds and keping them off a healer, since u can cast ice ward on anybody in the raid, also useful on will of the emperor when u need to keep the rages out of the way and frost nova is on cooldown.

T4, cauterize all the way unless u need to cheese a fight with the above example of heroic elegon and soaking the explosion from the add, in which case imp. invis would be the choice to go for, as for cold snap, there really isn't much point as a fire mage in using this talent, because with hypothermia u can't use 2 ice blocks straight after one another, and there are no frost spells as part of our rotation that can be reset with this cooldown, so not really worth it as the heal from it is really situational aswell, and more suited to pvp than pve.

t5, living bomb with 2-3 targets, also useful when there are more than 3 targets as the exlosion can affect more thn just the primary targets the spell was on, so u get nice splash damage from it, nether tempest has nice aoe potential, but is not as strong single target as living bomb, and frost bomb is actually quite competetive from an aoe point of view, just lacks single target power of living bomb again.

T6, this tier is kind of a mess tbh, rune of power is really nice when coupled with glyph of evocation, and is a good choice for low/non movement fights, although not the most powerful of the 3, it has alot of utility, incanters wrd is actually the "default" talent to choose, it has a small amount of + spell damage and mana regen as standard, and has the ability to be used either a defensive>offensive cooldown, or used whenever u feel like it would give the biggest dps gain, only down side is that it requires the shield effect to be broken, so when there is no incoming raid damage you kind of need to use whatever damage u can find to break it manually, as for invocation, i'm still not 100% sold on this talent, it is powerful no doubt, but the mechanic involved is kind of clunky, it is screwed over if u get interupted for whatever reason, and requires constant down time to channel, long fights with the ability to spend time channelling is fine, but short fights, or DPS checks are not a good option for this talent as the dps time lost channelling is quite high over the course of the fight, personally i haven't used this talent on any fight other than garalon, but with practice and timing it could proove to be very powerful, i just don't think we are at that point just yet.

I will never understand why people still consider Cauterize their ultimate survival cooldown. I've always dreamed of having something like Greater Invisibility that actually reduces your damage taken like practically all other classes and specs have. For just one global cooldown it grants you 4 seconds of 90% reduced damage taken, which is something far more beneficial for the entire raid than being able to continue dps for that one extra second while the healers need to spend mana to save your life anyway.

I will never understand why people still consider Cauterize their ultimate survival cooldown. I've always dreamed of having something like Greater Invisibility that actually reduces your damage taken like practically all other classes and specs have. For just one global cooldown it grants you 4 seconds of 90% reduced damage taken, which is something far more beneficial for the entire raid than being able to continue dps for that one extra second while the healers need to spend mana to save your life anyway.

if healers are wasting mana healing u up cos of cauterize (outside of big raid damage), then ur playing it wrong, also, cauterize is infinitely better than greater invis, as not only is it an automatic thing that happens should u recieve a killing blow, which allows u to spend GCD's on other things, plus with greater invis, if u are trying to soak damage, for example on elegon heroic and the big adds explosion, the damage from that is still enough to almost kill u even with greater invis active, and that requires healers to heal u up from almost dead, back to full, where as cauterize allows u to take teh hit, get healed up to 60% HP, ice block the effect, and job done, in addition, greater invis is on a much longer cooldown than cauterize, so u can utilise cauterize more often.

if healers are wasting mana healing u up cos of cauterize (outside of big raid damage), then ur playing it wrong, also, cauterize is infinitely better than greater invis, as not only is it an automatic thing that happens should u recieve a killing blow, which allows u to spend GCD's on other things, plus with greater invis, if u are trying to soak damage, for example on elegon heroic and the big adds explosion, the damage from that is still enough to almost kill u even with greater invis active, and that requires healers to heal u up from almost dead, back to full, where as cauterize allows u to take teh hit, get healed up to 60% HP, ice block the effect, and job done, in addition, greater invis is on a much longer cooldown than cauterize, so u can utilise cauterize more often.

Have you even done HC Elegon? Please explain how 90% of 500k = a one shot on 400k or so health. With ice barrier and greater invis, I take 0 damage which means I don't even get stunned.

if healers are wasting mana healing u up cos of cauterize (outside of big raid damage), then ur playing it wrong, also, cauterize is infinitely better than greater invis, as not only is it an automatic thing that happens should u recieve a killing blow, which allows u to spend GCD's on other things, plus with greater invis, if u are trying to soak damage, for example on elegon heroic and the big adds explosion, the damage from that is still enough to almost kill u even with greater invis active, and that requires healers to heal u up from almost dead, back to full, where as cauterize allows u to take teh hit, get healed up to 60% HP, ice block the effect, and job done, in addition, greater invis is on a much longer cooldown than cauterize, so u can utilise cauterize more often.

So cauterize is causing you to use another big time survival cooldown to be able to use the talent as you deem effectively? Do you see anything wrong with that? Don't get me wrong, I use cauterize for most accounts for unlucky RNG against me, but saying it is infinitely better is a bit ridiculous. Both talents have their places in the game and with the changes to cauterize, you will slowly see many more uses for Greater Invis. What I would suggest is temporal shield in conjuction with cauterize, it counter acts the loss of health with healing it right back, and then HoTs will do the rest. Also, your numbers are a bit skewed, I always use Greater Invis on heroic elegon and never have any issues with almost dying. Typically, I pop Temporal Shield right before he is about to explode, soak a tick or two with temp shield, then greater invis. I am typically at full before a healer even needs to throw a heal on me.

Back to the OP. Most of the talents provided can be used in certain situations, some will always used more often than others. Some better for pve, some better for pvp, and some are even better for leveling/questing. I'm sure we will see at some point where Cold Snap may even be needed for the immunity on a shorter CD.

So much missinformation out there on Mage bombs, everyone repeating the same info over and over even after so many changes....

Frost bomb hits for 57595 (self buffed) or 57595/12 = 3428 dps
Living bomb does 48775 over 11.17 seconds, factor in a 95% perfection for 48775/11.17*95% = 2963 dps
or if we cast Frost bomb for the same dps 57595 / 2963 = 19.4 seconds
Only drawback of this is that Frostbomb actually has a cast time vs the instant of LB.

So much missinformation out there on Mage bombs, everyone repeating the same info over and over even after so many changes....

Frost bomb hits for 57595 (self buffed) or 57595/12 = 3428 dps
Living bomb does 48775 over 11.17 seconds, factor in a 95% perfection for 48775/11.17*95% = 2963 dps
or if we cast Frost bomb for the same dps 57595 / 2963 = 19.4 seconds
Only drawback of this is that Frostbomb actually has a cast time vs the instant of LB.

Butbutbut with 3056 haste, Living Bomb has 5 chances to crit and Nether Tempest has 14 chances to crit while Frost Bomb has only 1 chance to crit and while I believe it all levels out on a large enough scale, Nether Tempest still pulls out a bit further ahead at the moment - with the rise of crit chance, the balance might tip in favor of Frost Bomb.

As for the survival cooldowns, I use Greater Invisibility to reduce the damage taken from Earthquake on Feng, from Velocity on Feng, if a lot of bad stuff happens at the same time on Spirit Kings, on Elegon so I don't have to reset my stacks between Sparks (or whatever they're called), on Zorlok to survive Force and Verve if necessary and on Ta'yak to minimize the damage taken for 4 seconds while I'm running in the tornado phase to allow our healers to deal with more pressing matters.

Ta'yak is as far as I've come on normal with my casual 25-man guild, LFR doesn't count, and on the other bosses I don't need Invis or Cauterize or anything.

I would imagine that on Heroic it becomes even more useful in various situations.

Why are people pushing Temporal Shield as the end-all be-all? It is good for fights with fewer, larger, predictable damage events. Ice Barrier is superior in fights with more constant damage. People using the argument that TS is off the GCD and therefor a dps increase are mistaken. Ice Barrier prevents spell pushback while casting. This more than negates the gcd used to cast it on several encounters. Healers don't always know when you are using TS and will be wasting mana targeting you with heals that will ultimately not be needed. Absorbs are almost always better than heals. This is why TS and IB were designed the way they were. There has to be more incentive to use TS in many cases to make it more attractive. The lack of gcd accomplishes this for fights with predictable, infrequent damage.

Butbutbut with 3056 haste, Living Bomb has 5 chances to crit and Nether Tempest has 14 chances to crit while Frost Bomb has only 1 chance to crit

In the end the crit chance will even out, one crit on Nether tempest is only 1/14th of its dps....

Assuming 25% crit, for ease of comparing... every 4 casts of
NT will have had 14 crit ticks
LB 5 crit ticks and 1 crit explosion
FB 1 Crit explosion
After 4 full durations all have critted for their full damage and FB is king

for example on elegon heroic and the big adds explosion, the damage from that is still enough to almost kill u even with greater invis active, and that requires healers to heal u up from almost dead, back to full, where as cauterize allows u to take teh hit, get healed up to 60% HP, ice block the effect, and job done, in addition, greater invis is on a much longer cooldown than cauterize, so u can utilise cauterize more often.

you cant iceblock the stun. your other points have been addressed above, wont add more insult to injury.

Originally Posted by namliam

So much missinformation out there on Mage bombs, everyone repeating the same info over and over even after so many changes....

Frost bomb hits for 57595 (self buffed) or 57595/12 = 3428 dps
Living bomb does 48775 over 11.17 seconds, factor in a 95% perfection for 48775/11.17*95% = 2963 dps
or if we cast Frost bomb for the same dps 57595 / 2963 = 19.4 seconds
Only drawback of this is that Frostbomb actually has a cast time vs the instant of LB.

Why do you factor in LB perfection but not on FBomb btw? It is just as likely that the FB will explode mid cast of a frostbolt. And as you know(i know you know :P) LB dont need to run out to gain the explosion, so you have ~2.5s to refresh it before it runs out(pref sub 1s though). Almost every fight have mechanics that makes it hard to keep 100% uptime on both LB and FBomb, frost takes longer to recast. As fire time spent on casting Fbomb is likely to reset ignite/less casts to gain Hu's etc.

I am not trying to say Fbomb dont have its place after it got buffed it can certainly work, i just think you/we need to add in more factors to make an actual judgement saying Fbomb is best. Personally i never use it, though with clear results i would change ofc, its just not as simple as 57595/12=X, and i cba to research it more as i like my LB with spread and the occasional NT =).

PS. I agree so much with "So much missinformation out there, everyone repeating the same info over and over even after so many changes...."

I do factor in inperfection on Frost bomb, the CD is 9.3 seconds and I am only counting on every 12 seconds to get to 3.428 dps. (2+seconds delay is 20% inperfection!)
Even if you are only casting Frost bomb every 19 seconds (more than DOUBLE its cooldown) do you hit the same number of dps. Granted the increase in dps is ~500 dps, in comparison to your average of say 70k dps per fight, it is only 1% increase.... on a fight of 7 minutes is only 210.000 damage extra, offcourse if you are wiping to Garalon at <3%-ish every little bit helps.
Though strictly speaking garalon is not a single target fight but yeah you know what I mean.

The cast time of Frost bomb is no longer than the GCD, the impact on ignite there for is non-existing, only (big) difference is you do have to stand there for 1.4 seconds , while for LB you can be moving....

NT has the further downside of not being able to spread via use of Inferno blast, which means you have to manually apply NT to each target, at a GCD cost so to keep 100% uptime on 8 targets you are constantly spamming NT on the 8 targets.... or every GCD you are missing out on 1.4/2.1 fireballs at an average hit of 75k. 50k dps loss on Fireball.

It seems like there is something wrong in my earlier post though, 57595/12 = 3428 dps is incorrect as are all the other ones... 57595/12 = 3428 dps
57595/12 = 4799.5 ?? I dont quite know what went wrong there??? Same goes for other numbers .... off by quite a bit?

Lets try again....
Now what would be realistic numbers for uptime on Frost bomb? 9.3 Second cooldown, which starts at the end of your cast of 1.4 seconds.
Assume we just started casting a fireball at 9 seconds, for 2 second cast time 11 seconds, add the 1.4 second cast time for 12.4 seconds. On average casting Frost bomb every 14 seconds accounting for movement and stuff doesnt sound like a to bad an average.

95% uptime of Living bomb seems like a nice number to aim for (single target that is).
Assuming you are only casually spreading LB thru use of IB only on HU, I am somewhat torn as one mage seems to use IB much more than the other mage. You would have an average of 25% of the ticks going to secondary (and third) targets... No more than 3 targets total though.
Which basicaly resolves to 1 in 2 LBs get spread and on average half the tick damage is applied (or using IB roughly every 20 seconds)

NT is another beast as soon as a second target appears you get the 50% bonus damage, however if you want it ticking on the that target too... You lose a GCD or as said 1.4 / 2.1 of a fireball at average 75k damage. Also for this one, same as LB lets not assume 100% uptime, or even 95%...
LB you have a rather big window of opportunity to lose nothing or near nothing by refreshing it, if you refresh NT before it drops of you will most likely lose multiple ticks.... lets say 90% uptime... One big issue with keeping NT on multiple targets is the loss of HU procs and the loss of ignite .... at more and more targets NT becomes less intresting to me.

the (X%-Y%) for living bomb is X% ticks to additional targets, Y% explosions from additional targets

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Frost bomb

4.149

6.224

8.299

10.373

12.448

14.523

16.597

18.672

20.746

Living bomb (100%-100%)

4.211

8.421

12.632

12.632

12.632

12.632

12.632

12.632

12.632

Living bomb (050%-75%)

4.211

6.843

9.476

9.476

9.476

9.476

9.476

9.476

9.476

Living bomb (025%-75%)

4.211

6.318

8.426

8.426

8.426

8.426

8.426

8.426

8.426

Living bomb (050%-50%)

4.211

6.316

8.421

8.421

8.421

8.421

8.421

8.421

8.421

Living bomb (025%-50%)

4.211

5.791

7.371

7.371

7.371

7.371

7.371

7.371

8.426

Nether tempest (100%)

4.002

8.258

10.511

12.765

15.019

17.273

19.527

21.781

Nether tempest only second target

4.002

6.004

If I did the math correctly this time, Taking the 50-50 or 25-75 for LB doesnt seem to matter much.... but having 1:2 LBs spread is a save assumption IMHO.
One Target: Everything seems to be about equal.
Two targets: If you are activaly keeping NT on two targets for 90% of the time and they are within 10 yards of eachother, or you activaly spread LB 100% of the time... That seems to be best for 2 targets. Assuming you cannot / will not get 100% uptime on LB but rather 50-50 or something, then NT becomes the winner.
Three targets: Frost bomb and Living bomb seem very close, I think the loss of HU and such to keep up NT is to much compared to the small gain in dps you get.
Four targets: Definatly NT is getting to much loss here for my tase, though on the dot itself it is the winner, spending half the time refreshing NT is not viable to me. Still a toss up between Frost and Living bomb.
Five targets: NT forget about it IMHO, Frost bomb starts winning unless you get 100% of LB spreads all the time
Six targets or more: Frost bomb.

So for me:
1 target, take any for easier playstyle pick Living bomb IMHO
2 Targets, NT keep up dot on both OR Living bomb and actively spread/refresh
3 targets, Living bomb and actively spread/refresh
4 targets, Frost or Living bomb or NT but wouldnt keep it up on 4 rather just 3 targets.
5 targets or more Frost Bomb

Which kinda brings us back to the... Take Living bomb 4 or less and Frost bomb if more targets.

See now we are talking If your math is correct witch i assume it is this is very interesting. Though as you said in the last phrase it lines up pretty well with the current thoughts on the subject.

i would like to add that i only use NT in cases were i cant spread LB or get Fbomb explosion on other targets, f.ex. Garaj(if you for some reason is not upstairs permanently). or amber shaper, if your guild is having a hard time controlling living ambers, in practice i also feel like i gain more dps from NT on 25m WotE. My main reason for not taking it on single target or even dual is the refresh mechanics, as NT is much more receptive to lag/cast in channel etc compared to LB that gives you some more room to manage.

Keep in mind though I used an average of 14 seconds for Frost bomb which I think is rather high-ish, though I have never really tried in in raid.... if you down that to 12 seconds you do get extra dps out of Frost bomb